Whenever they encountered smooth ice, the cook, Dawa, and
the porters would place their loads on their wooden sleighs

Despite the efforts of our guides, we were unable to continue further upriver that day. To sleep, we split up into three small groups and spread our sleeping bags in grottoes formed beneath boulders piled up along the narrow stretch of solid ground. We tend to forget that even sleeping bags and warm parkas are a recent introduction to Ladakh. The first European ventured up the Chaddar in 1977 and remarked how the Zanskaris slept on the Chaddar: On their knees, like babies. Their traditional robes reach only to their knee, so that to lie flat would have exposed too much of the body. Draping the heavy woolen robe over themselves while kneeling also helped hold in their body heat.

Our porters said this place was among the worst in the gorge. It had an especially bad reputation among the people of nearby Lingshed village who were very reliant on the Chaddar for their winter supplies. It seems no group gets past without someone getting wet up to their waist or chest. Not surprising then that local people consult the spirits and astrologers before making this journey. Everyone carries a charm for protection, for a river like this is full of the dangerous kLu, or water spirits. I had two protectors, a small Ganesh, the elephant-god, suspended on a thread around my neck along with a crystal blessed by the Dalai Lama.

Other nights we camped in caves. The narrow gorge had surprisingly few places to accommodate even a small tent; by comparison the caves provided protection from falling rocks or the threat of avalanches, which presented a special danger with fresh snow falling on older snow, now very slick from repeated thawing and re-freezing. One cave, Kilima Bao, was large enough to accommodate us all – very comforting as still more as snow fell throughout the night and heightened our concerns over avalanching. “See,” one porter told me, “my prediction came true.” Several nights earlier he had told me of a Zankari saying, “If tea overflows the pot while heating, it will surely snow the next day.”

The porters are especially adept at retrieving driftwood from beneath boulders where it has been trapped during summer floods. But wood is becoming increasing scarce as the number of winter tourists escalates. The few junipers and other bushes are disappearing rapidly, and regulations requiring kerosene stoves for porters and visitors are urgently needed. Other changes are in the air: the Indian Army is forcing a road through this gorge hoping to connect Ladakh with the Indian “mainland” and enabling all-year access to its most remote region. There are of course pros and cons to such a road. While it will eliminate the need to gather fuelwood–a good thing for wildlife habitat, cars will make poaching easier–a threat that the ibex and snow leopards of the Zanskar River gorge have never really faced.

The people naturally welcome the road, but it will take many years for this massive project to be completed, and even the five year projection for the Padam-Leh segment is overly optimistic given the forbidding terrain and amount of rock-blasting required.

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